We’d like to post a warning for users on iOS 4.3 considering upgrading to 5.0 or for users on iOS 5.0 considering upgrading to 5.0.1

We advise holding off on upgrading until we release a new update of Foliobook (2.9) in the next week or two.

This is because there is a rare chance of experiencing data loss in Foliobook with these two upgrades, it has currently affected less than .1% of users, but we don’t want it to affect anyone who can avoid it.

This problem is a side effect of changes we made to accommodate updated data storage requirements made by Apple when iCloud was introduced. Unfortunately meeting this data requirements had an unintended side effect of making it possible for iOS to delete users pictures if an iPad is restored and/or starts to run out of storage space.

For anyone already running on 5.0 or 5.0.1, please ensure that your iPad has plenty of free storage space (5Gb if possible, but as much as you can spare if this isn’t possible) as this will safeguard you against the possibility of your imported images being ‘randomly’ deleted by iOS if runs out of storage space.

The 2.9 version of Foliobook will provide a fix for this and will in addition include backup/restore capability to help improve data security of Foliobook in future.

We’ve just released a screencast tutorial to explain the basics of subcategories. A little rough around the edges, but hopefully its helpful for people who want to structure their work into more categories.

An introduction to subcategories from Foliobook on Vimeo.

Foliobook 2.8 is a bug fix release that fixes several issues introduced in 2.7 to do with text and transitions and some other issues that we discovered following deployment on iOS5. It reintroduces the single tap operation to show and hide text when this is enabled in galleries and a problem that occurs when enabling location services for the first time.

We recommend this update for all Foliobook users who have upgraded to 2.7

We have just released Foliobook 2.7 onto the app store. The main reason for this release is to achieve compatibility with iOS5 has been released today.

At this point we haven’t used many new capabilities of iOS5, the aim has been instead to continue with the same functionality as version 2.6 but with some fixes. The release notes are below. Note that there are some known issues (see bottom) so if you are happy with version 2.3, and don’t immediately need iOS5 then you may want to consider delaying updates for a while until we have these corrected. There is one important fix for people who have already upgraded, or who bought 2.6, with respect to image quality. So we do recommend the update in this case.

Note that some of our recent changes to version 2.6 and 2.7 have been made to enhance the performance of transitions such as Wipe and Swipe. These changes have slightly increased the memory footprint of the app. As a result, we advise, particularly iPad 1 users to occasionally power off the iPad to free up memory resources. We are working in the next release or two to improve this situation.

The release notes for the coming version 2.7 update are below.

This version is compatible with iOS5 as well as iOS4.3

Please perform an iTunes backup prior to installation, as this iOS5 compatible version modifies where we store your existing data in order to comply with iCloud requirements. While this should work without incident, we recommend the precaution of a backup. See http://www.foliobook.mobi/faq/backup-and-restore for instructions

Additional features and fixes

Videos can be added to galleries if the video plugin is purchased

Start wizard and themes are improved

Fixes a bug in 2.6 causing a white line to be inserted along the edge and reducing image quality (detail) of some images

Fixes a bug in 2.6 causing no autoreturn function on all transitions

Known problems :

Text does not advance when using the full text mode (credits and copyright mode works correctly)

Autoreturn is not working on Swipe and Wipe transitions, but does work with Fade and Foliobook transitions

Help page on the gallery and slide sorter cannot be dismissed. The user must exit the app with the iPad button to dismiss help.